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June 29, 2012

Top 10 RIA-Friendly Indie BDs

Investment Advisor’s 2012 BD Reference Guide helps rank IBDs in five major categories, this one by their accommodation to RIAs

Which IBDs have the highest percentage of reps that are RIAs?

With all the turmoil in the markets, one might wonder which broker-dealers are thriving, which are merely surviving and which are shutting their doors.

Investment Advisor magazine releases its 2012 Broker-Dealer Reference Guide, a review of the top 25 BDs in five major categories using numbers through 2011, to help you sort it all out and ensure a lasting and profitable relationship for you and your clients. All data is as of April 1, 2012, and was supplied by the broker-dealers themselves. (Investment Advisor has not independently confirmed the data.)

As IA mentioned last year, the rise of “hybrid advisors”—those who affiliate with a broker-dealer while simultaneously running their own RIA firm—continues. “The advisor’s business will not grow through market appreciation simply because our analysts tell us returns will be lower going forward,” Bill Dwyer of LPL Financial told us last year. That “means advisors will have to grow their practices by adding clients. The autonomy that independent advisors experienced in the 1980s and 1990s, almost ruggedly so, is no longer possible,” Dwyer says. “It’s just too costly.”